Photograph by: A-Z
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Playing (in Polish and French with French subtitles) at: Excentris cinema

MONTREAL — The suspense is subdued, and slow in coming in Rafael Lewandowski’s first feature film. The Polish director, who worked previously in documentary television, explores the ties between sinister episodes in Poland’s history and its conflicted present in La dette.

The film opens with a shot of a man running through the woods, a shaky spotlight landing on his face as he turns to look behind him. That’s intercut with grainy Super 8 footage of a man, his wife and their young son; of a funeral; and of the father pulling his boy on a green sled, shot from a high angle, as if under surveillance. The pieces are in place: you can run from your past, but you can’t hide.

Pawel (Borys Szyc) and his father Zygmunt (Marian Dziedziel) make a decent living selling bags of second-hand clothes by weight. They buy their merchandise in France, and deliver it to clients back home.

At a truck stop on the return, while his father waits outside, Pawel pauses to watch a news bulletin about a trial relating to “one of the darkest periods in Poland’s history,” a miners’ strike that ended in bloodshed while the country was under martial law in 1981.

A woman is interviewed about a special service agent who is set to testify in the coming days. That woman turns out to be Pawel’s wife, Ewa (Magdalena Czerwinska), on the front lines of the fight to uncover the truth.

Yet something doesn’t feel right. Pawel’s father has been on edge. He led the miners’ strike, but wants nothing to do with the trial. Familiar thriller formulae fall into place as news breaks that he was in fact a mole who had informed the communist government of the miners’ activities.

Was he really a mole? Or is this a ploy by members of the old regime? Zygmunt is furious, and dismissive, swearing his innocence. His son believes him, but people are talking. Soon, their customers are getting suspicious.

As the pair returns to France for another shipment, Zygmunt — at the behest of his brother, who is a French citizen — decides to stay there until the dust settles, leaving Pawel to work things out on his own.

Ewa considers moving the family to England to start over. Pawel, meanwhile, ponders buying a car and becoming a cabbie.

Mixing political commentary, family drama and understated tension, Lewandowski has a lot on his plate. There’s not quite enough dramatic punch to make this an effective thriller; it works best as a personal story of a son’s attempt to understand his father.

Serving as background is the generation gap between Poles who lived under oppression and their adult offspring who are trying to turn the page — easier said than done.

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